Neglect

Poetry as a genre tends to attract neglect, even by poets. -- Rukmini Bhaya Nair

Born hackneyed

What irritating phrases are hackneyed, at the end of the day (e.g.,"at the end of the day")? Mark Liberman tells us in a blog post with the distinctive title "Memetic dynamics of summative cliches."

Poetry is already redundant

An anecdote from Rukmini Bhaya Nair:

When Stephen Hawking visited India in the year 2000, I was privileged to sit in on some conversations with him. One of these occasions was when he was discussing the question of when "physics would become redundant." In another twenty years or so was the estimate, I believe - because all the important questions within the discipline would have been solved by then. What about poetry? I piped up and waited while the answer appeared with measured slowness first on Hawking's silvery computer screen and was then rendered in a distant metallic American voice by his speech synthesizer. This is the unforgettable sentence that Hawking uttered in answer to my question at the turn of the century:

Poetry is already redundant.

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I know we're all now supposed to say bad things about Bly, "Deep Image," yadda yadda, but you'll like this, I bet! It's from the mighty fine blog, VRZHU, Bullets of Love:

Robert Bly vs. New York Quarterly

Interviewer: Well, do you think that a poet should familiarize himself with numerous rhetorical devices such as oxymoron, anastrophe, synecdoche, and so forth in order to perfect the craft of his poetry?

Robert Bly: Read that sentence again.

Interviewer: Well, do you think that a poet should familiarize himself with numerous rhetorical devices such as oxymoron, anastrophe, synecdoche, and so forth in order to perfect the craft of his poetry?

Robert Bly: All those words are horribly boring when you read them to me. The sound of them—they’re all Greekish. Isn’t it odd that we haven’t developed Anglo-Saxon words? Words with senses in them that would describe these things? Do you follow me? We’re not satisfied with the Greek word for pig for example. We get our own word for pig. We have our own word for house. We think houses are important. It’s odd that these words you mention exist only in Greek form. I don’t think that to us, even to you, they are very important.

Interviewer: I think you will find many of those devices used in modern poetry and they enhance the poetry.

Robert Bly: But remember what T. S. Eliot said: “Well, you know I have never been able to remember the difference between anapestic and trochaic.”

Interviewer: He doesn’t have to remember that.

Robert Bly: If he doesn’t have to remember, who does then?

Interviewer: That’s a little bit different.

Robert Bly: How? How is it different?

The more personal a poem is, more likely it is to be political

"The more personal a poem is, more likely it is to be political." So writes the poet Rukmini Bhaya Nair, in her new book, Poetry in a Time of Terror. She writes as a postcolonial woman poet situated in Delhi, the daughter of a Goan mother and Bengali father who fell in love with English, which she calls "the forbidden language."

From her vantage point, North American squabbles would seem close to indecipherable, most notably the wrenching away from "sincerity," "sentimentality," and "the confessional," not that I believe the rubrics are useful in any way myself.

Here are a few paragraphs that remind us of another perspective:

"Now recognized as one of China's major poets, [Bei Dao] recently told a rapt audience in Delhi of how the generation which grew up during the Cultural Revolution faced a cultural crisis perhaps unknown before 'in this history of the contemporary world.' During those years, the realm of the personal was simply not allowed expression in Chinese literature. Love, jealousy, or personal rage were banished from the poetic scene. Language was terrorized into a kind of banal submission.

Chairman Mao, himself a poet, decreed what literature was all about, and his edict was that it was public feelings such as pride in China's greatness and hope for the future that should occupy China's writers. Poetry was not to be about ordinary human desire. But, by then, Bei Dao and his friends had learnt about Western literature - of the poetry of Celan and Baudelaire, and the plays of Lorca - in translation. They had fallen in love with the intensely private nature of these modernist masterpieces and their own poetry had changed as a result.

Ironically, the ruckus around being arrested for editing the rebellious Today magazine only made things easier for Bei Dao and his friends. Their works were seized but the secret police had no idea what this poetry was all about. It was superbly unfamiliar, preternaturally strange - a coded manifesto of defiance. But for the people of China this poetry of personal angst was thrilling. It expressed a wondrous resistance to terrors of the state - it gave back to them their ordinary lives."

The most interesting thing she advocates is rejecting the idea that female sexuality is to be identified with an exploration of the female body and the female psyche; rather, she says that - the personal being the political - female sexuality "is about crossing dangerously into sexual areas marked by social taboos," including those associated with writing poems.

This is a fascinating book about how poetry can fight "those two great historical foes of free speech: colonial meanness and postcolonial meaninglessness;" about how it's not only possible, but vitally important in an age of terror, to adopt a more "distributive or connectionist view of aesthetics."

Yet another installment of... Of Being Quiet!

A Scherzo. (A Shy Person's Wishes)
- Dora Greenwell

With the wasp at the innermost heart of a peach,
On a sunny wall out of tip-toe reach,
With the trout in the darkest summer pool,
With the fern-seed clinging behind its cool
Smooth frond, in the chink of an aged tree,
In the woodbine's horn with the drunken bee,
With the mouse in its nest in a furrow old,
With the chrysalis wrapt in its gauzy fold;
With things that are hidden, and safe, and bold,
With things that are timid, and shy, and free,
Wishing to be;
With the nut in its shell, with the seed in its pod,
With the corn as it sprouts in the kindly clod,
Far down where the secret of beauty shows
In the bulb of the tulip, before it blow;
With things that are rooted, and firm, and deep,
Quiet to lie, and dreamless to sleep;
With things that are chainless, and tameless, and proud,
With the fire in the jagged thunder-cloud,
With the wind in its sleep, with the wind in its waking,
With the drops that go to the rainbow's making,
Wishing to be with the light leaves shaking,
Or stones on some desolate highway breaking;
Far up on the hills, where no foot surprises
The dew as it falls, or the dust as it rises;
To be couched with the beast in its torrid lair,
Or drifting on ice with the polar bear,
With the weaver at work at his quiet loom;
Anywhere, anywhere, out of this room!

(ca. 1867)

NB: "Scherzo" means "joke" in Italian.

What's wrong with criticism?

J.C. Hallman says James Wood "honed in" a few years ago on what's wrong with criticism:

"He noted the tendency of critics to regard themselves as sleuths and texts as criminals: 'Having been caught out, the poem is triumphantly led off in golden chains; the detective writes up his report in hideous prose, making sure to flatter himself a bit, and then goes home to a well-deserved drink.'"

Result: "The dry, tenure-desperate prose of critics, who already have far too much say over how literature is perceived in the world."

Solution? "Another kind of criticism."

Or, perhaps [tongue-in-cheek alert!] as I've suggested on Harriet... graded short reviews, something like The Dean of Rock Criticism, Robert Christgau’s long-running “Consumer Guide” for the Village Voice. Here’s one version of a grading system he used (substitute poetry book for record, and reading for listening, and you’re in business):

"An A+ record is an organically conceived masterpiece that repays prolonged listening with new excitement and insight. It is unlikely to be marred by more than one merely ordinary cut.

An A is a great record both of whose sides offer enduring pleasure and surprise. You should own it.

An A- is a very good record. If one of its sides doesn’t provide intense and consistent satisfaction, then both include several cuts that do.

A B+ is a good record, at least one of whose sides can be played with lasting interest and the other of which includes at least one enjoyable cut.

A B is an admirable effort that aficionados of the style or artist will probably find quite listenable.

A B- is a competent or mildly interesting record that will usually feature at least three worthwhile cuts.

A C+ is a not disreputable performance, most likely a failed experiment or a pleasant piece of hackwork.

A C is a record of clear professionalism or barely discernible inspiration, but not both.

A C- is a regrettably successful exploitation or a basically honest but quite incompetent stab at something more.

A D+ is an appalling piece of pimpwork or a thoroughly botched token of sincerity.

It is impossible to understand why anyone would buy a D record.

It is impossible to understand why anyone would release a D- record.

It is impossible to understand why anyone would cut an E+ record.

E records are frequently cited as proof that there is no God.

An E- record is an organically conceived masterpiece that repays repeated listening with a sense of horror in the face of the void. It is unlikely to be marred by one listenable cut."

SpeedReview no. 1

Joel Brouwer raised the question on Harriet of the possible worth of what he calls "SpeedReviews TM." Here's one, which I put in the comment stream to that post.

Recently, I blogged about one of my favorite books, Mary Oppen's Meaning. I'm just now reading another book that reminds me of it in many ways, Margaret Avison's autobiography, I Am Here and Not Not-There, published on absolutely beautiful paper (remember paper?) by The Porcupine's Quill. (The title comes from something that happened at the famous Vancouver Poetry Conference, 1963: “This question was put by a registrant: ‘What makes a poet’s language distinctive?’ We all fell silent, trying to pin it down, then tried to answer. Not just affection for words, which is common to all good writers; not necessarily a matter of cadence, formal structures, rhythm. The answer that came to me, forced out of minutes of dismissing options, was new to me too: ‘It is saying ‘I am here and not not-there.’”)

The book opens with a poem, which “occurred” to her while sleeping – at the age of 88! The poem, she says, citing Tennyson’s “I am a part of all that I have met,” is not actually autobiographical, though it’s drawn from nine decades of living:


A Novel in Miniature

My aunts are robust. I
still have all
four. Do
yours come vividly
to mind at mention of
a comment at first
glimpse of the
no longer new baby?

'Look at the X nose
on the wee face!' (Or
any kinship-logo-feature they
spot, or think they do).

That may be why
the X family keeps
a keepsake portrait of great-
grandfather Jock in the
dark or a
wall near
the front stairs landing but
not near enough for you
to stand and view it.

The prose part of the book, her story, begins with a memory of being in church, "spitting up into Mother's dainty, lavender-scented church handkerchief during the service, and its soft damp silky touch on my chin."

How can you not want to read this and find out the rest?

On being mutually dependent

Concepts, institutions and ideologies conventionally seen as antagonistic are actually mutually dependent. -- Claire Altree

I like you so much it embarasses me. There are all sorts of good reasons not to like you, except that of not liking you, because I do. How fantastic to feel what we don't want to, and to have an independent heart. -- Fernando Pessoa (from a notebook that never was, October 2008 issue of Poetry)

Am I going to see "Bright Star"? - a mini Q&A

Qs by Michael Marcinkowski; As by me. Occasion: reading at Columbia College Chicago earlier this month. (For Bright Star content, skip to the middle of this post.)

Q. [No stated question here, but rather dubiousity about the deployment of aphorism in Squandermania.]

A. ... and so, for example, when I use the word “chestnut” in the poem, "On Original Intent," ("... that old / chestnut, The Constitution of the United / States of America") I allude to this etymological crux:

http://blog.oup.com/2009/09/ever-green-chestnut/

Q. I stutter with your poems as they approach an epistemological level, particularly with your (introductory) insistence on the truth-value of certain words. The OUP article on chestnut and its uses shows how little truth there actually is in language? Are your considerations of the realness of words in that case just pandering to weaker strains of thought?

A. Weaker strains (literally) of thought are my only subject “matter.”

Q. In your turnabout of the aphoristic or whatever, you still retain the framing of a traditional poem, which, in some parlance (perhaps post-Hesiod (?--which is to say, like, forever)) itself buys into the frame set of the aphorism and is complicit with it. As such, it seems that your turning of the aphoristic chestnut, in your use an explicitly poetic form, is suspect in its affinity with such a selfsame thing. This leaves the parsing of the ironic and non-ironic parcels of the poems to such a heightened level of differentiation that it may fall to the same fate as many of our favorite conceptualists' works: that they are only able to be properly read by a reader of a certain initiation? The fault I find with much moralizing conceptual work is that the ideal reader for the work (one who would cause the text, as it were, to act) exists only in the unwashed mass who is able to be radicalized via a certain turnabout in the re-contextualization of a demotic text, yet it is exactly those unwashed masses who are unable to perform the subtle differentiation necessary to achieve such an effect (the path toward such a theoretical backing needed to understand the work of course by its nature transforming one from being unwashed to washed). Which all bears the question: how do people come to understand? (Lukacs, as I’ve said before, I think, deciphered the issue as well as anybody, in his writings concerning class consciousness, where the formulation came down to: If a proletariat can recognize themselves as the proletariat, what use is the party? With the answer, of course, bobbing between via praxis.)

A. Yes, the framing is part of the strain. It makes no sense to attempt a distortion that retains no aspect of the frame. At the same time, yes, I buy into the frame set. If I did not, I would have no interest in “writing” “poetry.” (What use is the poetry party, etc.?) If one doesn’t buy into it, there’s always photography, filmmaking, painting, and other “arts.” My moralizing is therefore pure and limpid, and perhaps even necessary. For me if nobody else.

Q. I like the four poems that are in a row starting with “Honi soit.” With their longer lines and more compact form, they muddle the slantwise aphorisms in a much more exuberant way. They play well, their confessionalism (signified by the 14 lines, of course, and not the content . . . wink wink) works as a strophe against the aphorism in a very natural way. The shorter lined poems in the book work more deliberately in their stepping. These 14 line poems seem “real in the world” and I therefore more believe their (non) conclusions.

A. Thank you. At first, the whole book was in sonnet-like box form. But then I came up with “the title poem” and said to hell with it.

That’s it in a chestnutshell.

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And the last question comes from me, and is answered by same:

Q. Are you going to see the movie, Bright Star?

A. Well, my considerations include the following. First of all, Keats is naked without his Cockney accent: he did not speak "estuary" English. Nor, for that matter, did Wordsworth. Or Bunting. This is a serious flaw. Keats was not posh.

Second, as my Facebook friends have pointed out: Keats is depicted in the film as skinny: "WRONG!" says Paige Morgan. And "not just skinny, but a HIPSTER," says J.S.A. Lowe.

On the evidence of the trailer, above, I can picture this cinematically handsome fellow sipping a pumpkin spice latte, pecking at his iPhone to message his BFF, Fanny Whatshername, and giving interviews. So... it's looking doubtful.

I may just re-read this classic book, instead (you can hear Sir Christopher talk about JK here and here):

Your attention, please!

My Attention Span 2009 book list can be scrutinized by clicking here.

Revenons à nos moutons: another dam installment of Make It New, Already!

Conflict - Battle - Bottle. Pissing in a Bottle. Kissing in a bottle, in a B. Botom (Bum) Rum (this made me laught) Pirates. 15 on d. man's chest. From Rumm to Bokhara one monarch the calif. Tried to write Bokk. Boc. A drink. We keep getting to drinks. Rum and milk. Milk bottle. Milk battle. Rattle. A conflict over milk silk. Sick. I evidently was in trouble before the age of six, for already at that time I tried to die of dysentery. Wine. Dis-entry. De sentry. To die of dis-entry. Failure to enter. Silk. Sick. Six. Beating. Carpets. To enter what? Car-Ker-K? My mother's name was K for Con. Failure to enter Con. What about the B. Bottom. Bum? Failure to materialise (state) here. Stale. Tail ('s tail).


why did I write "laught"?
Laughton
Lost-on
looked on
hooked on
Jews
Circumcision.
Rum made me circumcised
Milk did.
Liquids did.
My penis was cut because I had liquids. Having liquids results in being
cut.
Ostracised.
Dead end.


[This extraordinary writing is an excerpt of marginalia by T.H. White (author of The Once and Future King) found in his copy of C.G. Jung's Two Essays on Analytical Psychology (1928). You can read more of it in H.J. Jackson's superb Marginalia: Readers Writing in Books.]

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I recently wrote about Mary Oppen's wonderful book, Meaning. Here's a link to a piece by Joy Katz about George Oppen's "silences" that really caught my attention. A sample:

"Much has been written about Oppen’s decision to quit writing and work as an agitator for the communists, and later to fight in World War II. But was conscience the biggest reason for his silence? It’s hard to imagine now, because our politics does not make demands on our poems. Most of us strive mainly to meet aesthetic demands, not that that burden is light. But communism told poets what to write. True, Oppen chose to quit writing. But for him, and for readers of this essay, one assumes, given the same circumstances, there would be no choice. How many of us would stop writing if all the publishers, the prize-givers, the journals, the editors we know, all of our peers, said: Your poetry must not be about your mother’s nipples; your Letters to Wendy’s are an ethical failure; your poems about robots are punishable unless you make clear that the robots represent the plight of the worker. Would we write the poems asked of us, even for a revolution we believed in?"

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Only the latest research for you, my reader(s)! Recently, we reported the proof that there's no such thing as "chance." More support for the completely obvious can be found in the following article, "Connections From Kafka: Exposure to Meaning Threats Improves Implicit Learning of an Artificial Grammar."

For those who don't have time to read much, here's the abstract:

ABSTRACT — In the current studies, we tested the prediction that learning of novel patterns of association would be enhanced in response to unrelated meaning threats. This prediction derives from the meaning-maintenance model, which hypothesizes that meaning-maintenance efforts may recruit patterns of association unrelated to the original meaning threat. Compared with participants in control conditions, participants exposed to either of two unrelated meaning threats (i.e., reading an absurd short story by Franz Kafka or arguing against one's own self-unity) demonstrated both a heightened motivation to perceive the presence of patterns within letter strings and enhanced learning of a novel pattern actually embedded within letter strings (artificial-grammar learning task). These results suggest that the cognitive mechanisms responsible for implicitly learning patterns are enhanced by the presence of a meaning threat.

Wayne Brown, RIP

I am extremely sad to hear that the Carribean poet and fiction writer, Wayne Brown, has died. We taught together back when I did any teaching, and I admired, respected, and liked him a great deal. Wayne was the only non-British poet to receive the famed Gregory Fellowship in poetry at Leeds University, coinciding with the development of their program in Commonwealth and Postcolonial literatures.

You can read more about him here; and there's an old audio interview here (latter via Tony Eprile).

From "The Witness"

... you hate him, mock him as he moves
among the shrapnel of chipped stones,
the palm trees' tattered flags, the stiff
trunks flung down face in the sand....

Later, on the well-lit train
to a colonial future
narrow as rails, you ask, "Who
Was that stranger by the sea?"

Another installment of Make It New, Already: On hugging the left margin, etc.

In 1892, Kenneth Grahame (of The Wind in the Willows) published a playful little essay entitled "Marginalia" in the National Observer, reminiscing about his own childhood love of margins as places for drawings and jokes; he whimsically spoke up for "the absolute value of the margin itself" and wondered when the world might hope for "a book of verse consisting entirely of margin." This essay, reprinted in Grahame's Pagan Papers, prompted an admirer to make him a present of a blank book entitled Margin, which he accepted with a graceful, ironical thanks for "a copy which I understand exhausts the Edition & baffles the clamorous public." -- H.J. Jackson, Marginalia

No layoffs from this condensery

Black Hawk held: In reason
land cannot be sold,
only things to be carried away,
and I am old.

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I just got back from giving a reading with Emily Warn at Milwaukee's superb home for poetry, Woodland Pattern. What a great place to browse and treasure hunt! Emily picked up a fantastic Ronald Johnson broadside and an armload of books. J. and I bought all kinds of stuff, including a tear-inducingly poignant late book by Bern Porter!

But best of all: thanks to the extraordinary generosity and delightfulness of our hosts, Chuck Stebelton and WP owner/poet/UPS truck driver/activist/Niedecker caretaker Karl Gartung, we spent a day paying homage to Lorine Niedecker at her cabin on Black Hawk Island near Ft. Atkinson, and at her graveside.

I went canoeing with poet and teacher-of-many-things Patrick Moran (whose work was recently introduced to readers by D.A. Powell, and whose brother Jim runs the amazing Hamilton Wood Type Museum!) on the Rock River.

Sadly, her humble cabin was humbled further when it got flooded last summer; here's a before & after:





I can scarcely articulate how much I admire Niedecker as a person and poet.. so I won't try; to gush would be inapt, for as Basil Bunting memorably put it, no one said so much with so few words.

And it's just as well that blogger software makes it hard to indent poems properly, because I'd be tempted to infringe a copyright by reproducing Niedecker's "Paean to Place," which was inescapably in our minds. But you can read it by clicking here... which I hope you'll do: "Do not save love / for things / Throw things / to the flood."

Perhaps you'll come to the Lorine Niedecker Wisconsin Poetry Festival on October 3rd and 4th; please support both the Friends of Lorine Niedecker and Woodland Pattern if you care for her work and for folks who are unbelievably dedicated to poetry. What a great and humbling respite from po-biz sludge!

Pictured up top: "Mouth of the River" from Niedecker's "Handmade Poems," in the Danowski collection at Emory University; photo by Jim Sitar (click it to enlarge)

Meet Carl Sandburg (in honor of the release of The Beatles' remasters)

Boot Fail

Click here for your own poster of the Boot Failure Troubleshooting Flowchart - and see whether viral marketing for books is really worth it.

Codex help desk

Before we all forget how to use printed books, I thought I'd supply this video helpdesk to show you how to get started:

On "schools" of poetry

"Meaning" and the modern

Mary,
Mary, we turn to the children
As they will turn to the children
Wanting so much to have created happiness
As if a stem to the leaves—

-- George Oppen, from his poem “Return.”

With the fairly recent and welcome republication of George Oppen’s New Collected Poems, about which I’ve spoken elsewhere, it seems to me important to note that George was not the only great writer in the family: Mary Oppen’s book Meaning is surely one of the classic, albeit unsung, memoirs of the twentieth century. And modern as we think modernism is, this excerpt – about Mary’s childhood vacations - will show you just how close writers of the Oppens' generation were to a decidedly unmodern way of life… and it’s a great end-of summer bit of writing, as well:

“The roads we traveled were dusty or muddy; saplings or logs laid across marshy places in the road made what we called “corduroy,” over which our wheels rumbled as we passed. Sometimes the men in our party cut more saplings to lay over deep mud. Bridges which had been built for horsedrawn lumber-wagons were thrown across streams of ravines by lumber-workers. The roadway on these bridges was of planks laid over an understructure of logs, with no side rails; we dismounted before crossing to lighten the load in the car [a Model T!] and someone always walked in front of each car to make sure the wheels stayed on the planks. I then crossed to the other side on foot, aware of the drop to a sometimes roaring river far below. Wide rivers had a ferry, usually manned by a father and son who lived nearby. The road which slanted steeply down into the river was visible on the other bank, rising steeply to continue into wilderness. We passed horses with caution, as they were still unused to seeing cars and might bolt. We seldom met another car, and we never passed one; Papa usually slowed down to wait until the huge clouds of dust had settled. If it had rained, sheets of water flew out as our wheels passed through puddles in the road. Before a trip, Papa inquired at the Post Office until he found someone who had recently been over a road we planned to go on, because roads washed out, bridges gave way, marshy places became bogs and ferries were sometimes not running. A trip in any direction from Kalispell [Montana, where Mary’s family lived] was an adventure.

One vacation […] another child and I started across some shallow rapids with a young woman from another tent holding us each by one hand. As she lost her footing in the swift current she let me go, and I was swept downstream. One of the men heard our screams, jumped in and rescued me. I don’t remember fear – perhaps it happened too fast – what I do remember is the strange assortment of clothing that was found for me until my own dried out.”

Mary came from relatively rough and humble beginnings; yet though comfortable, her family’s social and other fortunes apparently declined somewhat after her father’s death, which occurred when she was fifteen years old. Because her father died of cancer, she wanted to be a doctor, but didn’t take well to college education, and she left school. She tried again, saving money to attend the Agricultural College in Corvallis – but was ejected for spending a night off campus with George, who she'd met there through an English teacher, talking about poetry and making love. Mary eventually made an extraordinary and unconventional life for herself, with George as her poet-companion; at an early age, the pair took to the road - decades before Kerouac. About this she wrote:

"We had learned at college that poetry was being written in our own times, and that in order for us to write it was not necessary for us to ground ourselves in the academic; the ground we needed was the roads we were travelling... We understood from our experiences while hitchhiking that in the United States we were not required to remain in the class into which we were born. We wanted to see a great deal of the world, and the education of which we talked for ourselves was to leave our class and learn our life by throwing ourselves into it."

Mary and George eventually married, despite her conviction that their relationship was "not an affair of the State." He wore his college roommate's baggy plus-fours, and she a borrowed purple velvet dress; they took along a pint of gin which they did not drink and a ten-cent ring that George forgot to pull out of his pocket till it was too late. And in 1932 - six years after Mary and George met - money she inherited from her family funded the publication of An “Objectivists” Anthology, issued by TO Publishers ("to," she explains, in the sense of "to whom it may concern," as on a bill of lading, or to indicate the infinitive, "to publish"), a small press begun by the Oppens with Charles Reznikoff, and Louis Zukofsky.

The rest, as they say, is history.